If I Were Starting Out On Steem: It's All About The Apps

@tarazkp wrote a wonderful piece pondering what he would do if he was just joining Steem. Coming up on his two years on this blockchain, he gave a nice overview of what he did, would continue doing, and what he would do differently.

I suggest all give it a read since it is packed full of wonderful suggestions.

https://busy.org/@tarazkp/if-i-were-to-start-on-steem-from-scratch

To summarize what a lot of that translates into: working one's ass (arse) off.

Success on Steem does not come easy. Looking at his list, a lot of it is time consuming. I will acknowledge it is not Chinese water torture since a lot of it is enjoyable. However, make no mistake, there are few shortcuts outside of purchasing STEEM (which is a perfectly viable approach if one is in a position to do so).

It takes time to learn and grow. We all need to work on our craft. As time passes, we get better at the content we provide while expanding our wings to others. Interaction with Steemians is crucial. Without that, the social part of social media is absent. This is a not a route to success based upon my observation.

Many talk about how different things are from a year or two ago. There is no doubt Steem is changing. That is a good thing. There are some who feel that those who were here then had an unfair advantage (whatever that means). That might be true but one needs to recall there were times when Steem did not look like it would survive. The path to today had a lot of bumps in the road.

That said, there is no fretting to be done. The first reason is it does no good so stop doing it. The second reason, is because with change comes opportunity. Today, there is one big advantage over what took place a year or two ago.

Steem is now about the applications. This is the pathway that everyone should be taking. It is going to cut through a lot of the garbage and help one to grow his or her account.

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If you want Steem success going forward, I suggest you start to immerse yourself in the applications. These are the golden tickets that have the potential to fill up account.

Let us be honest, the prospects of becoming a Steem Whale is minimal for most of us. Unless you have a boatload of currency, either fiat or crypto, 500K SP is mostly like out the window. Even 50K is a tall order without a nice nest egg to start. Some are even wondering if Dolphin is out of the realm of possibility for most.

If all this is true, they why are you going to keep banging your head against the wall? Actually, looking at the number of accounts that go inactive, most just leave. As I always say, their loss.

Here is the deal for those who remain. The most important thing you can learn about the Steem blockchain is every DApp that uses the SMT protocol to create a token will automatically be paired with STEEM. That means, if your goal is to really increase your SP, these tokens have a value since they can be swapped for STEEM.

Stop trying to pound your way through the wall when you can go around it.

Does this mean people should stop blogging and earning SP through interfaces such as Steemit, Busy, and Steempeak? Of course not. I would suggest that everyone keep focus upon the efforts there to bring in SP. However, today, there are a number of other options.

Anyone who regularly reads my posts knows that @dlike, @steemhunt, and @actifit are three applications I always refer to. The reason I do this is because those applications are awarding tokens right now for activity on their platforms. Sure they do not have a value established since the exchange is not set up nor can one swap them for anything else. What is being done now is accumulation.

While it might be hard to amass 5K SP, getting that many tokens over a 3 or 4 month period on the applications I just mentioned is a piece of cake. In fact, there are people earning a lot more than that in a lot less time. Do you know why that is?

Numbers.

There are 50K daily active transacting users on the Steem blockchain. Most of them are using the blogging interfaces (along with Dtube). This is where the herd is assembled.

Those who opt to utilize the applications I just mentioned will find a lot less people using them. Hence, the rewards are much greater. As an added bonus, not only do you receive the native token for the application, but most do upvoting out of the main account which means STEEM/SBD too.

By the way, simply because I mention these three does not mean one is limited to that. There are a few other tokens already being passed out like the CLEAN token which is awarded for picking up trash and posting a verification picture of that being done.

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The point is this: if I were starting out on Steem as a newbie today, I would gravitate towards the applications. Join the Actifit, Dlike, and Steemhunt discord groups. Entering the main chats will introduce you to the moderators and some of the other users. This is how one starts to gain a following.

@actifit is one of the best applications to use when starting out. The reason I write this is because there is a guaranteed upvote. Anyone who reaches the 5K level WILL receive an upvote from the main @actifit account. This is guaranteed and done on a daily basis. Over time, this will put SP, in addition to AFIT, in one's account.

I know @dlike and @steemhunt also upvote posts out of their main accounts, I am just not sure it is guaranteed. @dtube is another one that hits the upvote button on some posts although it does not have a token at this moment.

Steem is rapidly becoming a blockchain of applications. It is the applications that will take this blockchain forward. We are seeing a huge shift in the focus of the developers on here and the projects that are being churned out. Over the next 6 months, I expect this trend to continue. For this reason, I am making sure utilizing the applications is a part of my token accumulation strategy. I cannot tell you which apps will explode so I am collecting as many as I can. They are my lottery tickets.

Come the Spring, anyone who follows the suggestions in this post, will have a choice to make. Do you keep your SMTs or swap them for STEEM (or some combination)? SMTs are all going to be paired with STEEM providing a liquid market. So what do you do?

Wouldn't it be nice to be in that position where you have a bucket of application tokens that necessitates making a choice?

I know for a fact that one cannot help but to accumulate tokens by employing the strategy I mentioned along with the suggestions @tarazkp made. Read some of the posts by the applications and you will see, many of them are itching to give tokens away. They want the coins in the hands of people; that is in their best interest.

It is all about the apps.

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